Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa (August 26, 1910 – September 5, 1997) was an Albanian Roman Catholic nun who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata (Calcutta), India in 1950. For over forty years she ministered to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying, while guiding the Missionaries of Charity's expansion, first throughout India and then in other countries.

By the 1970s she had become internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due in part to a documentary, and book, Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to expand, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries.

Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

While Mother Teresa remains an important modern religious figure, letters of confession she wrote over the course of 66 years, recently published in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, suggest that her faith was not as concrete as the world suspected. In one of the letters, she writes of Jesus, "...the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand." Controversy remains on whether the letters were published against her wishes and whether her faith was as empty as her letters admit.